Dr King preaching from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 6 December 1964.
Photograph: Terry Disney/Getty Images

It was only on Monday that the main immigrant group in Britain decided to form a united front to agitate for social justice and oppose all forms of discrimination. But already Mrs Marion Glean, who is secretary of the new movement, has been called, among other things, a scorpion.

Some people, she says, seem to think of hordes of coloured people, like Black Muslims, storming about the place. One man even asked if they were going to be armed; did they have rifles?

“Well,” says Mrs Glean, “I have done some rifle shooting. But I’m a Quaker and I’m not going to shoot at anything but wooden ducks.”

Mrs Glean is 32. She came to England four years ago from Trinidad, works as secretary to the Quaker International Affairs Centre in London, and is also a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, where she is reading for an MA in social anthropology. In Trinidad she was trained as a librarian, joined the Friends, and did welfare work for the blind.

For some time, she thinks, a united movement has been needed. “It had to come, however unpalatable.” Then, when Dr Martin Luther King, the American civil rights leader, visited England last weekend on his way to Oslo to receive his Nobel Prize, he asked to meet members of the immigrant communities here.

So Mrs Glean, together with Canon L. John Collins, hastily assembled about 30 Indians, Pakistanis, West Indians, and Africans. On Monday they all met at the Hilton Hotel in London, where Dr King spoke for only a few minutes. The whole discussion lasted only an hour and a half, but at the end of it the new movement was formed and Mrs Glean appointed secretary.

At home yesterday she seemed a most unlikely militant. On the walls were Chinese prints and a Monet; in a bowl, a selection of gourds; in the bookcase Jung and Thomas Hardy. There was also “Das Kapital,” but Mrs Glean is certainly no Communist. “To be a Communist and a Friend,” she says, “is maybe not impossible, but it would be a strain.”

So far the new movement is not even named. What it will do, and how, has yet to be decided. The first real meeting will be tomorrow week in London, and Mrs Glean is getting in touch with Indians at Southall, Pakistanis in Bradford, West Indians in Birmingham, asking them to come. Those who met at the Hilton came mainly from London and around.

Mrs Glean stresses that though she is a Quaker she is speaking privately and not as a representative of the Friends. She is also careful to make clear that the new movement is “not a coloured front vis-a-vis the rest” and that many members will probably be white, just as in America there are many white people in the civil rights campaign.

Perhaps the movement will fizzle out. Or it may be just the beginning of something bigger. Mrs Glean is hopeful.